


To Make and Mend

by Beleriandings



Category: Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Genre: (I would say post-canon but we'RE GETTING A NEW BOOK), Charter Magic, Family, Found Family, Gen, Recovery, Sendings, post-Abhorsen, sort of fluff?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 01:55:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5439176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A task will help Lirael to heal, Sam thinks, give her something to focus on and keep her from dwelling on the past as she recuperates at Abhorsen's House. He is right, but healing comes in many kinds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Make and Mend

Lirael would either be found in the study or the reading room, Sameth thought in the small corner of his mind that wasn’t swimming with Charter marks, rehearsing the spell he had been preparing every moment. He was carrying a human-sized silver wire armature, neither male nor female, just slightly taller than he was himself. His arms were clasped about its broad chest as though in a hug to lift the thing off the ground, and he could barely see where he was going.

Still, he thought, he had promised to find Lirael for what he was about to do, to show her his craft he loved so much.

Awkwardly, he shouldered open the study door, his mind still full of marks. “Lirael! Are you in…” he tailed off.

“What are you doing?” asked Sam, peering around the model in his arms to stare around the room before him nonplussed, frozen in the doorway as he took in the sight that greeted him. 

Lirael did not answer, or even look up. In fact Sam wondered whether she could see at all, or if her eyes saw only a flood of golden-bright Charter marks, so deep was her concentration. He stood back, watching her in awed fascination as she sat cross-legged in the midst of a cluster of sendings, their glow pale and faded in the brilliant newly-cast Charter lights of the study. 

Very faded indeed, in fact, Sam realised after a moment of watching Lirael. Her hands, palms down, were placed on the Charter-ghost hands of a kneeling sending, palm to open palm. These sendings all looked old, washed out, some of them even beginning to unravel, the spells that made them unspooling here and there to trail their constituent marks onto the thick carpet. 

He squinted into the room, laying aside the silver-wire armature, reluctantly letting the marks he had been going through in his own head slip away. This, for now, was more interesting. Lirael had cleared away most of the study’s furniture to the sides of the room, making a space in the centre. As he watched, the sending kneeling before his aunt began to straighten its back, lifting its bowed head so that its cowl started to fall back a little, and he could see the blank place below where its face should be begin to pulse with a renewed golden light. It pushed out its chest below its robe, and Sameth thought that if it had had lungs and a throat and a mouth, it might well have sighed with relief then. 

And then all of a sudden it was done. He saw Lirael smile a little, her concentration flickering back into the present, and the golden light pooling and welling at her palms faded and then promptly ceased to flow. Gently, she clasped her hands around the Charter-mark limned ones of the sending, letting the very last marks sink into its spell-flesh, before releasing it, looking up at last. 

“…Hello, Sam” she said, blinking a little blearily as she came back to herself. “What are you doing here?”

He grinned, crinkling his forehead in amusement. “I could ask the same of you. Lirael, is it me or are you  _fixing_  the old sendings?”

She did not smile, but simply nodded, entirely serious, as she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear that had escaped the long braid she had begun wearing. “Yes.” She tilted her head as she saw his expression, and frowned a little. “Should I not be?”

“Well” said Sam, furrowing his brow as he tried to think. “No one really  _fixes_  sendings. At least not that I’ve ever heard of…”

“I hadn’t actually read of it ever happening either” confessed Lirael, “which I always thought was a little strange.”

“People always just… make new ones” said Sam, his frown deepening as he tried to remember all the lore on the making of sendings he had ever read. “That was what I was going to to do, before Mother got back… she did say that the older House sendings were growing a bit faded and befuddled, and so I thought I would make some more.” He would have been proud of that, having something to show his mother on her return, though of course he had been making sendings for many years. Sabriel, at present, was busy dealing with the rogue Dead that been once in the service of Orannis, but had slipped through their wards and guards since the Destroyer’s binding in Ancelstierre. Poor weak things, most of them, but one broken, enraged and sun-stricken hand alone could still kill a farmer or a fisherman, or a child on their way to the village school, easily enough. This Sabriel knew from bitter experience. And so she travelled the Kingdom, even as Touchstone and Ellimere returned to Belisaere. With Nicholas back in Corvere, Sam and Lirael were left at Abhorsen’s House while Lirael grew used to her new hand and recovered her strength.

Lirael had wanted to travel with Sabriel, Sam knew. She had wanted to help. But in his own heart, Sam agreed with his mother’s decision to go alone; Lirael still had much healing to do, and not only in body. 

 _A task_ , he had thought, back then. Something that would keep her busy, give her something to help with and to focus on, for Lirael was less given to fall into self-pity if she were busy. This much at least Sameth knew about her, his aunt who had so quickly become one of his dearest friends. It was not hard to see, since it was a trait he himself shared. 

Clearly Sabriel had thought the same. 

_“The sendings are growing old and faded. Most Abhorsens make a few, but my father had no inclination or much time to spend on it, and sending magic is not my speciality” she had said briskly, as she climbed into her paperwing, strapping herself into the belts. “Sam, once Lirael’s hand is finished and fitted, would you please assist me once more? Lirael, you can help him, if you like. But only once you’re healed, mind!”_

_They had both nodded, and wished her well, and Sabriel had said farewell too, flying away with a whistle and a gust of windblown Charter marks._

And so he had turned to reading, intent on brushing up on his sending-lore. His mother’s praise meant much to Sam, and after all, he thought, these sendings were to last for generations. The thought that a sending he made would outlive him and everyone he knew and loved was always a little sobering to Sam, yet somehow he revelled in it too.  _Perhaps that was what it was to be a Wallmaker_ , he had thought at the time, with sudden clarity. 

But then of course Lirael had thrown him, yet again. She always did things a little differently, turning problems on their head and solving them upside down. She reminded him a little of Nicholas in that. 

“Lirael” he said, beckoning over the sending that she had just finished with, holding out his hands. It eagerly offered him its own, and though it had no face and could not speak, he had the distinct impression of a jubilant smile, of a voice laughing and saying “ _Look! See what she has done for me?_ ”

Sam shook his head and smiled in wonder as Lirael stood up, brushing off stray Charter marks that clung to her clothes and hands. She flexed her golden fingers, inspecting them critically. “I’m still not as skilled at casting Charter magic with it” she said, frowning. “Nothing to do with your work, of course, I just… it’s taken a while longer than I expected for me to get used to it.”

He raised an eyebrow, laying down the sending’s hand once more and nodding to it in thanks. He hadn’t even known it was  _possible_  to repair sendings; people always did seem to just make new ones, as far as he had ever heard… though now that he considered it, the marks would not need to be so different from the making spell itself… “Lirael, where did you learn this magic?”

“I sort of… invented it” she said, shrugging. “I mean…” she turned a little pink, looking up at the ceiling and brushing the back of her flesh and blood left hand over her cheek, hastily. “I studied a lot of sending-lore, when I made… at one point in my life. I knew the marks of making them well enough… why should I not repair them?” She gently brushed the back of her gold and Charter magic hand seemingly without realising what she was doing, with the very tips of her fingers. The hand that Sam had made her, which he himself was already looking at with a critical eye, _planning its next model, improvements on the design_. “We repair people after all, don’t we?” She said, breaking into his musings. “We give them second chances, put them back together again?”

He blinked at her for a moment. “I… yes we do.”  _I may be a Wallmaker, but I still have much to learn, I suppose_. “Lirael, would you do something for me?”

She was a little quicker to smile, these days. “Of course!”

“Please could you teach me?”


End file.
